A seventeen-year-old boy sits on the grass outside the caddy pergola with a book, waiting for a second loop on a ninety-degree afternoon. Behind him, a practice net that a country club bought for domestic use has developed a tear nobody has noticed, probably that same morning. The caddy master shouts a surname across the lawn. The boy looks up. It takes The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian eleven pages to assemble that second, and the remaining four hundred to work out who, if anyone, should be made to pay for it.
Nobody in Tallmadge Was Ever Going to Blame the Club
The village at the centre of this novel has fewer than seven thousand people, a brick school, an Episcopal church and a country club whose rules keep the caddies out of the pool, out of the dining room, and out of both decent lavatories. They are expected to walk round to the staff one by the kitchens. Somebody once sited the practice equipment so that it points directly at the pergola where those same caddies sit waiting for work, fifteen yards off, and in five years not one member has thought that odd enough to mention.
Bohjalian lays this groundwork so patiently that the eventual prosecution feels less like a legal event than a social one. The girl who hit the ball is Mira Winston, eighteen, a genuine prodigy who beats every man at the club and is bound for Yale. The dead boy, Kenny Foster, arrived from Florida a year earlier, lives in the only ranch house on a street of Tudors, and has a father whose company car carries advertising on both sides. When a district attorney later selects a jury by household income and a defence lawyer does the same in reverse, the reader has already understood the trial’s actual question: which of these two children was the village prepared to treat as expendable, and is it willing to admit that in a courtroom.
The Second Novel Running Underneath The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian
Mira has been going to hotels since her fifteenth birthday with a married management consultant three decades her senior, a man from her own street who occasionally makes up a foursome with her father. She narrates all of it at sixty-six, and the achievement of these passages is that she refuses to hand the reader an easy verdict. She catalogues her own appetite and her own complicity, insists she looked older than she was, then turns and takes her argument apart. And she will not be a victim on cue, which is precisely what makes the grooming legible.
The novel is quietly furious about the ecosystem that produced this. A club pro makes jokes about lady golfers. Middle-aged men in a foursome offer to correct her swing. A creative writing professor in Manhattan hands her a copy of Lolita and says she might get a kick out of it. What the book understands, and states only once, is the inversion at the heart of it: the problem was never that she was drawn to older men, but that a certain kind of middle-aged man was always going to be drawn to her. Readers who want the framework behind that pattern will find it in the literature on child sexual exploitation, which the novel dramatises without ever once explaining.
There is a scene late on, in a Florida hallway, that settles the whole thread in a single word. It has been forty years coming and it is worth the wait.
Where It Falters
Four things hold The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian back.
- The memoir conceit sprawls. Detours into Malcolm Gladwell, a pandemic illness, a tiresome book group and American politics. Several are excellent essays. They are still brakes on a novel whose destination is announced in the prologue.
- The reader is addressed too often. Being told to treat a chapter as an examination question is charming once and mannered by the tenth time.
- The resolution arrives by coincidence. The question of who damaged the net is answered when a witness volunteers it from the public benches, which is moving and convenient in equal measure.
- Kenny stays a rumour. That is deliberate, since the point is that nobody troubled to know him, but it means the emotional weight rests almost entirely on two late scenes and a two-page epilogue.
Set against that, the period work is superb and never showy: Emerson, Lake and Palmer on a cafeteria turntable, quaaludes called disco biscuits, a mother who scoops after the dog with the baby wipes she saw advertised on television. The 1970s here are not a costume. They are the reason nobody suggests a traumatised teenager might benefit from therapy.
Where The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian Leaves You
The title of The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian is doing at least three jobs. It describes a golfer who is unbeatable inside her own county and was probably never tour standard, a fact she states without a trace of self-pity. It describes a sophomore being managed by a man who has done this before and will do it again. And it describes the institution itself, which hung equipment intended for a suburban garden directly in front of the workers it valued least, then took four decades to be asked why. Everybody is playing a game above their level. The account is settled by a boy who walked to the club because he had no car.
The final pages consist of a note. It is short, it is ordinary, it quotes a line from Machiavelli that two students picked up in an advanced history class, and it recasts every page before it. Few novelists would risk ending a four-hundred-page book on something so small. Bohjalian has earned it.
If You Finish This and Want Something Else
Anyone who finishes The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian tends to want either more of this author or more of this argument. For the first, The Jackal’s Mistress shares the same unhurried moral bookkeeping and another woman making a decision her neighbours will never forgive. Readers who came chiefly for the legal theatre will find a lighter, funnier treatment in Courtroom Drama by Neely Tubati Alexander.
Beyond these shelves, Bohjalian’s own Midwives is the earlier blueprint for the shape used here, with a death nobody intended and a community deciding in public what it would prefer to be true. Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal remains the sharpest novel on the subject of an adult, a teenager, and the elaborate accounts both parties build in order to keep living. And for a British take on class as the thing that quietly decides who gets prosecuted, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club is worth the detour, though it is a good deal kinder about its adolescents than this book is prepared to be.